Books with author By (author) Honore De Balzac

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Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in "Penguin Classics". In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugenie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. "Eugenie Grandet" is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comedie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice. M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac's characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background. Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comedie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Lucien de Rubempré and "Abbé Herrera" (Vautrin) have made a pact, in which Lucien will arrive at success in Paris if he agrees to follow Vautrin's instructions on how to do so. Esther van Gobseck throws a wrench into Vautrin's best-laid plans, however, because Lucien falls in love with her and she with him. Instead of forcing Lucien to abandon her, he allows Lucien this secret affair, but also makes good use of it. For four years, Esther remains locked away in a house in Paris, taking walks only at night. One night, however, the Baron de Nucingen spots her and falls deeply in love with her. When Vautrin realizes that Nucingen's obsession is with Esther, he decides to use her powers to help advance Lucien.

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The Purse is a short story that makes up part of Honore de Balzac's epic cycle The Human Comedy. Daydreaming while working on a ladder, the painter Hippolyte Schinner accidentally falls and sustains an injury. Two neighbors—a mother and daughter—come to his aid, and he falls in love at first sight with the beautiful young woman, Adelaide. But over time, he begins to notice that the veneer of aristocratic gentility that the two project is not what it appears.

This novella is a story told as a conversation between four "cormorants" (the metaphor is Balzac's) who sit and drink in a private room while their talk is overheard through the paper-thin partition and reported to us by Balzac himself (or a fictional representative of the writer). As in all of Balzac's tales of financial trickery, the machinations are incredibly involved and complex yet their effects are devastating...

This novella is a story told as a conversation between four "cormorants" (the metaphor is Balzac's) who sit and drink in a private room while their talk is overheard through the paper-thin partition and reported to us by Balzac himself (or a fictional representative of the writer). As in all of Balzac's tales of financial trickery, the machinations are incredibly involved and complex yet their effects are devastating...